The pandemic has made us think about how the Nordic countries react both similarly and differently in their societal strategies. In newspapers and on social media, people have speculated about the different lines of reasoning that the Nordic countries took during the pandemic’s first phase in spring 2020. Especially why Sweden deviated. Suddenly we saw new variances between countries: the Swedish Public Health Agency had a different role in Sweden than the corresponding authorities in Finland and in Norway. In Sweden, temporary constitutional changes can only be made during wartime. Who knew? At once, the meaning of Nordic comparisons became more evident in the classic realisation of “we are similar but still not the same”. One area in which comparisons have always come quite naturally is research into major substance consumption trends and use patterns. For many decades, researchers have discussed how to make measurements more uniform and how to interpret the analyses in comparable fashions. In this issue, we publish the results from a project with the aims of comparing Nordic situations and developments. In this project, alcohol use in old age has been studied by researchers from four Nordic countries. Kim Bloomfield and Christoffer Tigerstedt (2020) write in their introduction about the great lack of recent countryspecific analyses of drinking patterns in old age. The studies of this journal issue focus on four aspects of alcohol use with the most comparative indicators: prevalence of current drinking, prevalence of frequent drinking, average amounts of alcohol consumed, and prevalence of heavy episodic drinking. Both the current situation in the countries (Bye & Moan, 2020; Jensen et al., 2020), as well as development over time (Raninen & Agahi, 2020; Tigerstedt, Härkönen et al., 2020) are mapped. In the end, the research group concludes and summarises the study with many

中文翻译：

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谁发起北欧比较？


这场大流行让我们思考北欧国家在社会战略上有何相似和不同的反应。在报纸和社交媒体上，人们对北欧国家在 2020 年春季疫情第一阶段采取的不同推理方式进行了猜测。尤其是瑞典为何偏离了这一思路。突然间，我们看到了国家之间的新差异：瑞典公共卫生机构在瑞典的作用与芬兰和挪威的相应当局的作用不同。在瑞典，临时宪法修改只能在战时进行。谁知道？北欧比较的意义立刻在“我们相似但仍不一样”的经典认识中变得更加明显。比较总是很自然地进行的一个领域是对主要物质消费趋势和使用模式的研究。几十年来，研究人员一直在讨论如何使测量结果更加统一以及如何以类似的方式解释分析结果。在本期中，我们发布了一个项目的结果，旨在比较北欧的情况和发展。在这个项目中，来自四个北欧国家的研究人员对老年饮酒情况进行了研究。 Kim Bloomfield 和 Christoffer Tigerstedt（2020）在他们的引言中写道，最近非常缺乏针对特定国家的老年饮酒模式分析。本期研究重点关注最具可比性指标的饮酒四个方面：当前饮酒流行率、经常饮酒流行率、平均饮酒量和重度间歇性饮酒流行率。这两个国家的现状（Bye & Moan，2020；Jensen 等人，2020），2020）以及随时间的发展（Raninen 和 Agahi，2020；Tigerstedt，Härkönen 等人，2020）被绘制出来。最后，课题组对本次研究进行了总结和总结